Page:McLoughlin and Old Oregon.djvu/34

 could draw, she could paint, and spin and weave and knit, and they watched her fingers with curious eagerness. Far back on the plains she had cemented a lasting friendship with the Indian women by her quick intuition of their wants and her readiness in learning Nez Percé, but to Mrs. Whitman the men bowed down as at a shrine before a golden goddess. The silken cape that encircled her soft, white neck seemed like the fluttering of wings, her golden hair like an aureole of light. When she sang forty years after, tears leaped to the eyes of the old fur-traders at the memory of the prima donna of Fort Vancouver. Quickly the children and the voyageurs caught from her lips the plaintive, "Watchman, tell us of the night," to vie thenceforth with their French chansons in the forest.

At Dr. McLoughlin's request Mrs. Whitman heard his daughter recite every day. Eloise had the fresh enthusiasm that has never been cloyed by schools or tasks. While the girls of New England were patiently working their samplers, this princess of the Columbia was embroidering caps and moccasins. While the girls of New England practised formal scales in music, Eloise was picking up the tunes of the voyageurs, and might often be seen in her light canoe darting across the Columbia, singing as she went the wild songs of old Canada.

If the missionary-brides instructed the ladies of Fort Vancouver, they, too, were taught in the lore of lustrous sables, silky sea-otter, thick brown mink, and soft black beaver. Eloise could tell them that the fiery fox was a prize in China, that the Russian would give a hundred silver rubles for the sea-otter that the Chinook slid down and speared as it slept on the shore, that the dappled bearskin would line the coach of an English